International fruit growers up in arms over Canadian-designed GM apple that cannot brown

In test fields in New York and Washington state stand about 100 trees bearing the Canadian-designed Holy Grail of fruit science: an apple that cannot brown.

“It’s a tremendous trait to have overcome when it comes to putting apples in new markets and new places — and building the consumption of apples,” said Neal Carter, the founder of Okanagan Specialty Fruits, the small biotechnology company that created the Arctic Apple, so named for its unspoiled interior.

When hell freezes over, when pigs have wings, when peeled apples stop browning

But as the Arctic Apple wends its way toward final approval in both the United States and Canada, genetic-engineering alarmists and entrenched apple interests alike are increasingly framing the new fruit as a profane creation of perverted science.

“When hell freezes over, when pigs have wings, when peeled apples stop browning,” reads a recent editorial in the Invermere Valley Echo, one of a barrage of anti-Arctic Apple screeds that have been hitting blogs and the pages of B.C. community newspapers.

On Nov. 14, the B.C. Fruit Growers Association joined the fray, calling on Ottawa to ban the Arctic Apple before it could even reach final market approval, arguing that even considering the apple was inalterably damaging its business.

“The public thinks of apples as a pure, natural, healthy and nutritional fruit,” said association president Jeet Dukhia in a statement. “GM apples are a risk to our market image.”

Similarly, south of the border, since early 2012 the U.S. Apple Association has been staunchly claiming that “no one is asking for this apple.”

In its latest annual report, the group announced it had mobilized its crisis communications subcommittee to refine its talking points in anticipation of the expected 2014 approval the Arctic Apple by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“U.S. Apple is on call to safeguard the image of apples and apple products,” the group assured its members.

Mr. Carter, a veteran apple grower, said his opponents in the industry are simply scared of “anything that’s going to compete with their outdated methods.”

“New things in the fruit and produce business, that’s the reality, and these growers associations need to get their head out of the sand and realize that,” he said.

“We speak in this country of innovation, but every time it happens people get worried and paranoid about it.”

As per Statistics Canada, Canadian apple production is indeed in a tailspin.

In 2001, 26,000 hectares of Canadian soil were planted with apple trees. By 2010, the proportion had dropped to 18,000 hectares. In only 10 years, Canada had lost an area of apple orchards the size of Manhattan.

Consequently, in the same 10-year period Canadian apple production dropped by an incredible 129,800 metric tonnes.

The explanation for all this is simple, claims Okanagan Specialty Fruits. Baby carrots, seedless watermelon and other “exciting” innovations are capturing the dollars of the produce-eating public, while the imperfect apple is pushed to the sidelines.

Apples turn brown because of a specific enzyme in the fruit’s cells that react with oxygen when those cells are ruptured by cutting or biting the apple.

Currently, the only defence is to stick to slow-browning varieties such as Cortland or Granny Smith, or to apply an acidic anti-browning agent after the apple is cut.

The developers of the Arctic Apple silenced the gene sequence that creates that enzyme. The result is a product that still rots, but doesn’t exhibit “superficial damage,” according to company literature.

The Arctic Apple has been more than 15 years in the making, and when Okanagan Specialty Fruits’ biotech labs first opened in the late 1990s Mr. Carter said he honestly did not think a non-browning apple was going to be controversial.

Anti-genetic engineering feelings were already strong in Europe, but “we thought North America was going to be smarter than Europe, and consumer attitudes were going to get better, not worse.”

“We made a wrong call there, for sure,” he said.

In mid-November, two well-known anti-GE organizers, Society for a GE-Free BC and the Canadian Biotechnology Action Network, announced they were launching a speaking tour in opposition to the pending approval of the Arctic Apple.

The product is facing off against anti-GE claims that it will endanger public health or contaminate existing varieties — both of which Mr. Carter can discredit — but as with U.S. and Canadian growers associations, the primary argument is that the fruit should not be allowed to see the light of day for the simple fact that nobody wants it.

“We don’t see any reason for it,” Dag Falck, an organic farmer and spokesman with Society for a GE-free B.C. told CTV this month.

In the United States, the fight is starting to get ugly. This month, the Washington, D.C.-based environmental lobby Friends of the Earth McDonald’s and baby food giant Gerber to get their position on the Arctic Apple.

When the companies both replied that they had no plans to source the product—a standard response for a product that has yet to secure FDA approval—Friends of the Earth instead trumped up the letters as “further proof that the market is rejecting GMOs.”

Arctic Apples on supermarket shelves are still a long way from fruition. If, as expected, the product obtains final approval in Canada and the United States, it will be years before Arctic Apple orchards are planted and matured.

A “vocal minority” may be having their say now, said Mr. Carter, but “we feel very much that Arctic Apples will sell themselves.”